Three poems by Linda E. Chown

More Than the Dying and the Wars and Our Words about Them

To sit here on this roof
with the Sierra Nevada mountains
in my mouth
and the Alhambra’s blossoming
gardens up my nose
and the tiled brown roofs
sloping and arching below me –
to sit here and be here
smoking, alive, sizzling a bit
in the sun.

Newspapers say nothing about this.
They want to make us
afraid.
They say people are dying
and the world’s all fucked up

I know I will go
behind the mountain
falling like a great snow-
covered cloud drifting,
and people are dying,
swollen up with need,
inching their way
through their way
like baby ants buried
under gray sand.

Take the papers away
and spread the world out
on the table.
Let’s eat it for breakfast
if we can.
Granada

Two Years in Europe Poem

I on the bed, shutters half-closed,
staring into the vacant holes
of an apartment half–done
the autumn sun casts a tinted yellow,
a mellow hue I look through
to the two years of living here
and all the many suns I drew,
of wind and rain and random thefts,
of gray hair coming and the griefs,
of full skies and autumn feasts;
no future it seems,
no surprises yet to come.

I lie ensconced in the heavy
cradle of the present.
These partial rhymes come like months
of light do, like I do,
passing through, passing through
the half-remembered glory
of wind-sounds and lip sounds
and the sun always off somewhere
writing her great orange story
in the lines of the sky
while I lie, trying to conjure something
solid out of my being
here so long.

Cádiz

Belief Is Not A Scoreboard

so, like Camus, whom I love,
belief is not a scoreboard,
a carbon copy of what
they said to be so
I am the forever wild child
running lone in what shines
suddenly